Unsurprisingly, another fantastic read from King. A What If? type story, in which The Riddler suddenly changes. Dispensing with the clues and sort-of dumbing down of his modus operandi, he walks up to a complete stranger and kills them with a gun, point blank, and waits for the authorities to arrest him. But while incarcerated he begins wreaking havoc and Batman has to delve into The Riddlers past to try and figure out what’s going on. It’s dark, it’s gritty, it’s interesting, and it’s the most compelling the villain has ever been. Also the artwork is phenomenal.

This was really great. Again, a comic that isn’t concerned with formulaic villain encounters and reruns of past arcs, turns out to be fun and fresh. When Jack-of-hearts returns, there is a central mystery at the heart of it, but it’s just about Jen trying to live her life while also endearingly taking care of this long lost friend, thought dead.

I’m reading as many of the Eisner award nominees.

This was one of them, and I’m apparently a lot more cold on it than others. I thought the art style and paneling was great, with the story being very straight forward, and it’s not even completed in this volume, apparently. A young man leaves on a quest to get golden seeds, as his people slowly waste away due to food shortages. Along the way there is themes of human beings as commodities as well. It fit together well enough, it’s just pretty much exactly how you think each conflict would resolve and how the story would go, so it just led to me kind of shrugging my shoulders.

Some great, some not so great, as anthologies tend to go. But overall some really joyous, queer stories that show how much rep has changed over the years, so I was very happy to consume it. Especially happy to see some ace rep. Some really really top tier artwork in some of these too. Just stellar.

This has made a bunch of best-of lists and it’s well deserved. Excellent in all aspects of craft, but really incredible paneling, artwork, colouring—and the story itself is compelling, as well as queer, as a bonus. I did not read what was happening with the character previously. Apparently, she was a part of The Green, ala Swamp Thing (which makes sense), and had godlike powers, but Harley, who is in a relationship with Ivy (I had no idea) made a decision to save Ivy’s life. The process cut her off from those powers and left her with a kind of infection, putting her life on a timer.

Most of the book is Ivy having left from that point, embarking on a scheme to seed the thing that’s killing her around the world before she succumbs herself. But mostly it’s about her dealing with loss and that grief, and attempting to find something worth living within her, before that happens. It’s full of empathy for characters. It’s not shy about letting Ivy be villainous as well as queer and loving, and intentional about showing when Ivy is monstrous and why.

It’s also quite the thrust trap, but has the goods to back it up.

Another Eisner nominee down. This feels very Gaiman-y. It’s charming and smooth. But it also doesn’t have all that much to say and reminds me of the genie story, where there’s a small twist that either will or will not interest you, and if it doesn’t, it really can’t do anything about it. In this case, for some strange reason, a knight seeking the grail enters present day and tries to entice an old woman who bought it at a second-hand shop type place to part with it. It has some things to say about being content with your life, but it does so in a way that doesn’t have any internal logic or conceit, and that never seems to fly with me. Very nice layout and artwork though.

Gorgeous visual craft deployed in this one, about a young Prince-to-be and his half sister, who narrowly escape the fate of their kingdom, destroyed because the prince has supposed precognition of tearing down an empire of, what appears to be, killer robots. This is obviously supposed to be a pretty long series though, because as they embark on this quest to go to the far north, they encounter various obstacles that take a pretty long time to move beyond.

They mostly act as devices for worldbuilding and to get the two to interact with more than each other. Otherwise they’re pretty much always at one another’s throats, which does get pretty boring. The Prince is a privileged child with no skills for surviving in the wild, and of course, the sister is the complete opposite and has no access to her feelings or much communication skills to speak of. It’s basically inverted masculine-feminine tropes, but their relationship feels well enough fleshed out. I struggled to connect with the plot though, as the larger arc seems incrementally progressed, and this backstory element became predominate instead.

I liked this more than the first volume actually. It seems to have landed with a thud for most others, but after adjusting to breadcrumb storytelling of long arc comics, it didn’t come as a surprise to me, especially after the first volume, that there would be a twist but not a resolution. I’m still interested in what comes after this major part and think it resolved some things that made it even more incredulous than things asserted beforehand. I’m not entirely sure it can navigate to the future where they’re clearly in a further future, and it’s basically some kind of dystopia hunger games thing, but the journey there, so far, is enticing enough.

Though, I am also more moved by interesting stylistic aspects of the genre. If something is aesthetically good and knows how to be engaging with paneling, I tend to like it more than things with good story and boring paneling and “bad” art. This is absolutely gorgeous and really good at using the medium. The only issue is sometimes the paneling is designed for digital screens and/or a lay flat binding, making it hard to discern full page spread flow in one or two instances.

This made a nomination for best continuing series in the Eisners, and I hadn’t heard of it, so I gave it a try. My library actually only has this first volume and there’s four out, probably more to come, if it’s still, obviously, continuing.

I think the major issue this has is that it doesn’t telegraph what it is, so the aesthetic does the talking. It looks like realism or detective noir, only with vampires—but it pivots into straight up urban fantasy conventions later on. Only not exactly, since there’s a through line of subversion of some of those expectations with social justice folding into the picture as a dissenting vampire opposes the (kind of strange) main antagonist: John Adams, the vampire.

What does work is the father-son relationship and arc, though. That was a solid foundation that allowed the otherwise gonzo plot to unfold, because it does go to a play I did not expect, which is saying something given the above. I would read the next volume, I think, and see why it’s one of the best continuing series, had my library had more copies of the next volumes. Maybe some day.

What sets this apart is the relationship between the main and his sister. It’s endearing and otherwise would be pretty cookie-cutter glow up. When his family is attacked he finds his sister isn’t quite dead, but is instead a demon! Only she apparently has some will to exert on the change, so is kind of like a vampire choosing to not kill humans, despite the hunger. When a demon slayer comes to kill the sister, he protects her and impresses said slayer, who forwards him on to a master that could teach him to be like him. How exactly this is relevant to the sister, we never actually find out. During the training she, like, hibernates? For literal years?

This is where it starts getting a little too silly for me. Montages of training over massive amounts of time and the sister just isn’t dead but sleeps. I mean, presumably, because she isn’t eating people, right? But who knows. But the thing that bugs me most is when characters develop skills offscreen. He will go into different forms and skills, to be used as Deus ex machina resolutions to conflicts later. And meanwhile the thing that I liked, the relationship between brother and sister, is completely nonexistent. There’s a fun little twist with his training near the end, but I still don’t even know why it’s important he become a slayer. Is it actually so people won’t attack his sister? Who apparently hibernates for years anyway, so what danger is she actually in? The plot just seems to be a thing that happens so he can get good and be cool.